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Archive for the ‘chemistry’ category: Page 243

May 26, 2021

Resetting the biological clock

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, neuroscience

The biological clock is present in almost all cells of an organism. As more and more evidence emerges that clocks in certain organs could be out of sync, there is a need to investigate and reset these clocks locally. Scientists from the Netherlands and Japan introduced a light-controlled on/off switch to a kinase inhibitor, which affects clock function. This gives them control of the biological clock in cultured cells and explanted tissue. They published their results on 26 May in Nature Communications.

Life on Earth has evolved under a 24-hour cycle of light and dark, hot and cold. “As a result, our cells are synchronized to these 24-hour oscillations,” says Wiktor Szymanski, Professor of Radiological Chemistry at the University Medical Center Groningen. Our circadian clock is regulated by a central controller in the , a region in the brain directly above the optic nerve, but all our cells contain a clock of their own. These clocks consist of an oscillation in the production and breakdown of certain proteins.

May 26, 2021

Scientists Discover a New Type of Biochemical That Could Be in All Life on Earth

Posted by in category: chemistry

The wonderful mess of molecules that make up living things is so complex, biologists have overlooked an entire class of them – until now. This missed bit of biochemistry is neither rare nor hard to find; it’s just no one had thought to look for it before.

“This is a stunning discovery of an entirely new class of biomolecules,” said Stanford biochemist Carolyn Bertozzi.

“It’s really a bombshell because the discovery suggests that there are biomolecular pathways in the cell that are completely unknown to us.”

May 26, 2021

Scientists find ultraviolet light may create life-essential chemicals

Posted by in categories: chemistry, mapping, particle physics, space

Circa 2016 o.o!


The theory used to be that hydrocarbons were created in “shocks,” or violent stellar events that cause a lot of turbulence and, with the shock waves, make atoms into ions, which are more likely to combine.

The data from the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory has since proved that theory wrong. Scientists at Herschel studied the components in the Orion Nebula, mapping the amount, temperature and motions for the carbon-hydrogen molecule (CH), the carbon-hydrogen positive ion (CH+) and their parent molecule: the carbon ion (C+).

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May 25, 2021

Europa May Have Seafloor Volcanoes That Could Spawn Life, Says NASA

Posted by in categories: chemistry, energy, space

Paradoxically, Jupiter’s ice-covered moon of Europa may have seafloor volcanoes capable of generating enough chemical energy and heat to support life, says new paper.

May 25, 2021

Eternally five years away? No, batteries are improving under your nose

Posted by in categories: chemistry, energy, sustainability

Researchers have also long been chasing lithium-air batteries that could realize a huge jump in energy density. And beyond lithium, there are other entirely different chemistries in development out there. At some point, one of them should click for one application or another.

Lithium-ion or not, an explosion of grid-scale battery installations is coming as prices continue to fall. The nascent art of lithium-ion battery recycling is also sure to mature and expand, improving the sustainability of these batteries by recovering and resetting their chemical building blocks.

Adopt cold-fusion-like skepticism of any of these future-looking statements as you please, but today’s batteries aren’t those of 20 or even 10 years ago. The same thing is bound to be true in another 10 years—even if that progress doesn’t come in a single, giant leap with global fanfare.

May 24, 2021

Spermageddon: are humans going extinct?

Posted by in categories: biological, chemistry, economics, existential risks

A new topic a new challenge for future civilizations.

I won’t write an introduction I will ask couple of questions to make you think about it.

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May 24, 2021

AI Helps Explain How Single-Celled Organisms Move in the Desired Direction Without a Brain

Posted by in categories: chemistry, food, robotics/AI

How do simple creatures manage to move to a specific place? Artificial intelligence and a physical model from TU Wien can now explain this.

How is it possible to move in the desired direction without a brain or nervous system? Single-celled organisms apparently manage this feat without any problems: for example, they can swim towards food with the help of small flagellar tails.

How these extremely simply built creatures manage to do this was not entirely clear until now. However, a research team at TU Wien (Vienna) has now been able to simulate this process on the computer: They calculated the physical interaction between a very simple model organism and its environment. This environment is a liquid with a non-uniform chemical composition, it contains food sources that are unevenly distributed.

May 23, 2021

Could blocking the sun save the planet?

Posted by in categories: chemistry, engineering, particle physics, sustainability

As the need for urgent climate solutions grows, scientists want to put more research into a technology known as solar geoengineering — the idea of chemically altering the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from Earth.

It is seen as a potential method of cooling the planet and offsetting climate change. But could such a technology curtail a climate catastrophe — or become the cause of it?

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May 23, 2021

The Mental Universe Hypothesis: Reconnecting to Your Cosmic Self

Posted by in categories: alien life, chemistry, evolution, mathematics, particle physics, quantum physics

From a purely scientific frame of reference, many quantum phenomena like non-local correlations between distant entities and wave-particle duality, the wave function collapse and consistent histories, quantum entanglement and teleportation, the uncertainty principle and overall observer-dependence of reality pin down our conscious mind being intrinsic to reality. And this is the one thing the current physicalist paradigm fails to account for. Critical-mass anomalies will ultimately lead to the full paradigm shift in physics. It’s just a matter of time.

With consciousness as primary, everything remains the same and everything changes. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology are unchanged. What changes is our interpretation as to what they are describing. They are not describing the unfolding of an objective physical world, but transdimensional evolution of one’s conscious mind. There’s nothing “physical” about our physical reality except that we perceive it that way. By playing the “Game of Life” we evolved to survive not to see quantum mechanical reality. At our classical level of experiential reality we perceive ourselves as physical, at the quantum level we are a probabilistic wave function, which is pure information.

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May 23, 2021

Scientists 3D print graphene aerogels that purify water at scale

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, chemistry, sustainability

University at Buffalo (UB) researchers have developed a novel 3D printed water-purifying graphene aerogel that could be scaled for use at large wastewater treatment plants.

Composed of a styrofoam-like aerogel, latticed graphene and two bio-inspired polymers, the novel material is capable of removing dyes, metals and organic solvents from drinking water with 100% efficiency. Unlike similar nanosheets, the scientists’ design is reusable, doesn’t leave residue and can be 3D printed into larger sizes, thus they now aim to commercialize it for industrial-scale deployment.

“The goal is to safely remove contaminants from water without releasing any problematic chemical residue,” explained study co-author and assistant professor of environmental engineering at UB, Nirupam Aich. “The aerogels we’ve created hold their structure when put into water treatment systems, and they can be applied in diverse water treatment applications.”